But the one that troubled Lib most showed a little girl floating on a raft in the shape of a broad cross, stretched out asleep, unaware of the wild waves rising around her. Je voguerai en paix sous la garde de Marie, it said. I something in something under the guard of Mary? Only then did Lib notice a sorrowful woman’s face in the clouds, watching the little girl.
She closed the book and put it back. Then thought to look at the card again, to see what passage it was marking. She couldn’t find anything about Mary, or the sea. Vessels was the only word that caught her eye: For the Lord bestoweth his blessings there, where he findeth the vessels empty. Empty of what, exactly? Lib wondered. Food? Thought? Individuality? On the next page, near a picture of a bilious-looking angel, Thou art willing to give me heavenly food and bread of angels to eat. A few pages farther on, marked with a picture of the Last Supper: How sweet and pleasant the banquet, when thou gavest thyself to be our food! Or perhaps that card went with thou alone art my meat and drink, my love.
Lib could see how a child could misread such flowery phrases. If these were Anna’s only books, and she’d been kept home from school ever since her illness, mulling over them without proper guidance…
Of course some children couldn’t grasp what metaphor was. She remembered a girl at school, a stony character with no small talk who for all her scholarliness was idiotic about everyday things. Anna didn’t seem like that. What else could you call it but stupidity, though, to take poetic language at face value? Lib felt like shaking the child awake again: Jesus is not actual meat, you dunderhead!
No, not a dunderhead. Anna had excellent wits; they’d just gone astray.
One of the nurses at the hospital had a cousin, Lib remembered now, who’d become convinced that the commas and full stops of the Daily Telegraph contained coded messages for him.
Almost five in the morning when Kitty put her head in and watched the sleeping girl for a long moment.
Perhaps Anna was Kitty’s last surviving cousin, it struck Lib now. The O’Donnells never mentioned any other relations. Did Anna ever confide in her cousin?
“Sister Michael’s here,” said the slavey.
“Thank you, Kitty.”
But it was Rosaleen O’Donnell who came in next.
Leave her be, Lib wanted to say. But she held her tongue while Rosaleen bent down to rouse her daughter with a long embrace and murmured prayers. Like something out of grand opera, the way she barged in to make a show of her maternal feelings twice a day.
The nun came in and nodded a greeting, her mouth sealed shut. Lib picked up her things and left.
Outside the cabin, the slavey was pouring an iron bucket of water into a gigantic tub that stood over a fire.
“What are you doing, Kitty?”
“Wash day.”
The laundry tub was set too near the dung heap for Lib’s liking.
“It’d be Monday, usually, not Friday,” said Kitty, “only ’tisn’t Monday Lá Fhéile Muire Mór?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The Blessed Virgin Mary’s feast.”
“Ah, really?”
Kitty rested her hands on her hips, staring at Lib. “’Twas on the fifteenth of August that Our Lady was taken up.”
Lib couldn’t bring herself to ask what that meant.
“Lifted up bodily to heaven.” Miming it with the bucket.
“She died?”
“She did not,” Kitty scoffed. “Didn’t her loving son spare her that?”
There was no talking to this creature. With a nod, Lib turned towards the village.
Lib walked back to the spirit grocery in the dregs of the darkness, a nibbled-looking moon low on the horizon. Before she lurched up the stairs to her bed above the grocery, she remembered to beg Maggie Ryan to keep some breakfast for her.
She woke at nine, having slept just enough to befuddle herself but not enough to clear her head. Rain was tapping the roof like the fingers of a blind man.
No sign of William Byrne in the dining room. Could he have gone back to Dublin already, even though he’d urged Lib to find out more about the possible involvement of the priest in the hoax?
The girl served her cold griddle cakes. Cooked—Lib deduced from the faint crunch—directly on the embers. Did the Irish hate food? She was about to ask after the journalist, then was struck by how such a question might sound.
Lib thought of Anna O’Donnell, waking up even emptier on the fifth day. Suddenly sickened, she pushed her plate away and went up to her room.
She read for several hours—a volume of miscellaneous essays—but found she was retaining nothing.
Lib set off down a lane behind the spirit grocery despite the rain pattering on her umbrella; anything to be outside. A few disconsolate cows in a field. The soil seemed to be getting poorer as she walked towards the only elevated land, Anna’s whale, a long ridge with one thick end and one pointed one. She followed a path until it petered out in bogland. She tried to stick to the higher, drier-looking areas, purpled with heather. She saw something move out of the corner of her eye; a hare? There were depressions full of what looked like hot cocoa and others glinting with dirty water.
To avoid soaking her boots, Lib jumped from one mushroom-shaped hummock to the next. Occasionally she swung her umbrella point downwards and poked the ground to check its firmness. She picked her way along a wide ribbon of sedge grass for a while, though it made her nervous to hear a trickling below, an underground stream, perhaps; was the whole landscape honeycombed?
A bird with a curved bill stalked past and sent up a high-pitched complaint. Small white tufts nodded in ones and twos across the wet ground. When Lib bent down to look at a curious lichen, it proved to have horns, like those of a minuscule deer.
A chopping sound came from a great gouge in the ground. When Lib approached and peered in, she saw the hole was half full of brown water, and there was a man in it up to his chest, clinging by one hooked elbow to a sort of rudimentary ladder. “Wait!” she cried.
He gawked up at Lib.
“I’ll be back with help as soon as I can,” she told him.
“I’m grand, missus.”
“But—” She gestured at the engulfing water.
“Just taking a bit of a rest.”
Lib had misunderstood again. Her cheeks scorched.
He swung his weight and gripped the ladder with his other arm now. “You’ll be the English nurse.”
“That’s right.”
“Don’t they cut turf over there?”
Only then did she recognize the winged spade hanging from his ladder. “Not in my part of the country. May I ask, why do you go down so low?”
“Ah, the scraw at the top’s no good.” He gestured at the rim of the hole. “Just moss for bedding animals and dressing wounds, like.”
Lib couldn’t imagine inserting this rotting matter into any wound, even on a battlefield.
“For turves for burning, you have to dig down the length of a man or two.”
“How interesting.” Lib was trying to seem practical, but she sounded more like a silly lady at a party.
“Are you lost, missus?”
“Not at all. Just getting my constitutional. Exercise,” she added, in case the turf cutter was unfamiliar with the word.
He nodded. “Have you a slice of bread in your pocket?”
She stepped back, discomfited. Was the fellow a beggar? “I do not. Nor any money either.”
“Ah, money’s no good. You want a bit of bread to keep off the other crowd when you’re out walking.”
“The other crowd?”
“The little folk,” he said.
More fairy nonsense, evidently. Lib turned to go.
“You’ll have been up the green road?”
Another supernatural reference? She turned back. “I’m afraid I don’t know what that means.”
“Sure you’re on it, nearly.”
Looking the way the turf cutter pointed, Lib was startled to spot a path.
“Thank you.”
“How’s the girleen doing?”
She almost answered with an automatic Well enough but stopped herself in time. “I’m not at liberty to discuss the case. Good day.”
Up close, the green road was a proper cart track paved with crushed rock that began all at once in the middle of the bog. Perhaps it led here from the next village, and the final section—the one that would bring it all the way down to the O’Donnells’ village—hadn’t been built yet? Nothing particularly green about it, yet the name promised something. Lib set out at a brisk pace on the soft verge where occasional flowers bloomed.
Half an hour later, the track had zigzagged up the side of the low rise and down again without any obvious reason. Lib clicked her tongue with irritation. Was a straight path to walk too much to ask? Finally it seemed to turn back on itself, disheartened, and the surface began to break up. The so-called road petered out as arbitrarily as it had begun, its stones swallowed up by weeds.
What a rabble, the Irish. Shiftless, thriftless, hopeless, hapless, always brooding over past wrongs. Their tracks going nowhere, their trees hung with putrid rags.
Lib stomped all the way back. The wet had slanted under her umbrella and misted her cloak. She was determined to have a word with the fellow who’d set her on that pointless course, but when she got to that bog hole, all it contained was water. Unless she’d confused it with another one? Beside the great bite out of the earth, turf sods lay on drying racks in the rain.
On the way down to Ryan’s, she spotted what she thought was a tiny orchid. Perhaps she could pick it for Anna. She stepped onto an emerald patch to reach the flower and too late felt the moss give way underfoot.
Thrown headlong, Lib found herself groveling facedown in slime. Although she got up on her knees almost at once, she was soaked through. When she hauled up her skirt and set one foot down, it sank through the peat. Like a creature caught in a snare, she clawed her way out, panting.
Staggering back down the lane, Lib was just relieved that the spirit grocery was close by so she wouldn’t have to walk the length of the village street in this state.
Her landlord, in the doorway, raised his bushy eyebrows.
“Treacherous, your bogs, Mr. Ryan.” Her skirt dripped. “Do many drown in them?”
He snorted, which brought on a coughing fit. “Only if they’re soft in the head,” he said when he could speak again, “or loaded with drink on a moonless night.”
By the time Lib had dried herself off and put on her spare uniform, it was five past one. She strode as fast as she could to the O’Donnells’. She’d have run if it hadn’t been beneath the dignity of a nurse. To be twenty minutes late for her shift, after all her insistence on high standards…
Where the laundry tub had stood this morning was an ashy puddle with a four-footed wooden dolly laid down beside it. Sheets and clothes were draped over bushes and pegged on a rope strung between the cabin and a crooked tree.
In the good room, sipping tea with a buttered scone on his plate, sat Mr. Thaddeus. Outrage swelled up in Lib.
But then, he didn’t count as a visitor, she told herself, being the parish priest and a member of the committee. And at least Sister Michael was sitting right beside Anna. Undoing her cloak, Lib caught the nun’s eye and mouthed an apology for her lateness.
“My dear child,” the priest was saying, “to answer your question, ’tis neither up nor down.”
“Where, then?” asked Anna. “Does it float between?”
“Purgatory should not be considered an actual place as much as time allotted for cleansing the soul.”
“How long a time, though, Mr. Thaddeus?” Anna, sitting up very straight, was as pale as milk. “I know ’tis seven years for every mortal sin we commit, because they offend against the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, but I don’t know how many Pat committed, so I can’t do the sum.”
The priest sighed but didn’t contradict the child.
Lib was revolted by this mathematical mumbo jumbo. Was it Anna who was suffering from religious mania or her whole nation?
Mr. Thaddeus put down his cup.
Lib watched his plate for any crumb to fall. Not that she could really imagine Anna palming and swallowing it if it did.
“’Tis a process more than a fixed period,” he told Anna. “In the eternity of the Almighty’s love, there is no time.”
“But I don’t think Pat’s in heaven with God yet.”
Sister Michael’s fingers slid over Anna’s.
Watching, Lib hurt for the girl. As there’d been only two of them, the siblings must have clung together through the worst of times.
“Those in purgatory are not permitted to pray, of course,” said the priest, “but we may pray for them. To expiate their sins, to make amends—’tis like pouring water on their flames.”
“Oh, but I have, Mr. Thaddeus,” Anna assured him, eyes huge. “I’ve made a novena for the Holy Souls, nine days every month for nine months. I’ve said Saint Gertrude’s Prayer in the graveyard, and read Holy Scripture, and adored the Blessed Sacrament, and prayed for the intercession of all the saints—”
He held up one palm to hush her. “Well, then. That’s half a dozen acts of reparation already.”
“But that might not be enough water to put out Pat’s flames.”
Lib almost pitied the flailing priest.
“Don’t picture it as an actual fire,” he urged Anna, “so much as the soul’s painful sense of its unworthiness to come into God’s presence, its self-punishment, you see?”
The child let out one harsh sob.
Sister Michael cupped the child’s left hand in both of hers. “Come,” she murmured. “Didn’t Our Lord say, Be not afraid?”
“That’s right,” said Mr. Thaddeus. “Leave Pat to Our Heavenly Father.”
A tear raced down Anna’s swollen face, but she swiped it away.
“Ah, God love her, the tender dote,” whispered Rosaleen O’Donnell behind Lib in the doorway. Kitty hovered at her elbow.
Being part of this audience made Lib suddenly uneasy. Could the whole scene have been staged by the mother and the priest? And what about Sister Michael—was she comforting the girl or luring her further into the maze?
Mr. Thaddeus clasped his hands. “Will we pray, Anna?”
“Yes.” The girl flattened her hands together. “I adore thee, O most precious cross, adorned by the tender, delicate and venerable members of Jesus my Saviour, sprinkled and stained with his precious blood. I adore thee, O my God, nailed to the cross for love of me.”
It was the Dorothy prayer! Adore thee and adorned by, not Dorothy—that’s what Lib had been hearing over the past five days.
After the brief satisfaction of having solved the puzzle, she felt flat. Just another prayer; what was so special about it?
“Now, to the matter that’s brought me here, Anna,” said Mr. Thaddeus. “Your refusal to eat.”
Was the priest trying to absolve himself of all blame in the Englishwoman’s hearing? Then make her eat that plump scone this minute, Lib urged him silently.
Anna said something, very low.
“Speak up, my dear.”
“I don’t refuse, Mr. Thaddeus,” she said. “I just don’t eat.”
Lib watched those serious, puffy eyes.
“God sees into your heart,” said Mr. Thaddeus, “and he’s moved by your good intentions. Let’s pray that you’ll be granted the grace to take food.”
The nun was nodding.
The grace to take food! As if it were some miraculous power, when every dog, every caterpillar, was born with it.
The three prayed together silently for a few minutes. Then Mr. Thaddeus ate his scone, blessed the O’Donnells and Sister Michael, and took his leave.
Lib led Anna back to her bedroom. She could think of nothing to say, no way to refer to the conversation without insulting the child’s faith. All across the world, she told herself, people placed their trust in amulets or idols
or magic words. Anna could believe whatever she liked for all Lib cared, if only she’d eat.
She opened All the Year Round and tried to find any article that looked remotely interesting.
Malachy came in for a few words with his daughter. “Which are these, now?”
Anna introduced him to the flowers in her jar: bog asphodel, bog bean, cross-leaved heath, purple moor grass, butterwort.
His hand absentmindedly followed the curve of her ear.
Did he notice the thinning hair? Lib wondered. The scaly patches, the down on her face, the distended limbs? Or was Anna always the same in her father’s eyes?
No knocks at the cabin door that afternoon; perhaps the constant rain kept the curious at bay. Anna seemed muted after her encounter with the priest. She sat with a hymnbook open in her lap.
Five days, thought Lib, staring so hard her eyes prickled. Could a stubborn child possibly last five days on sips of water?
Kitty brought Lib’s tray in at a quarter to four. Cabbage, turnips, and the inevitable oatcakes—but Lib was hungry, so she set to as if it were the finest of spreads. The oatcakes were slightly blackened this time, and raw in the middle. But she forced them down. She’d cleared half her plate by the time she even remembered Anna, not three feet away, muttering what Lib still thought of as the Dorothy prayer. That was what hunger could do: blind you to everything else. The wad of oats rose in Lib’s throat.
A nurse she’d known at Scutari had passed some time on a plantation in Mississippi and said the most dreadful thing was how quickly one stopped noticing the collars and chains. One could grow used to anything.
Lib stared at her plate now and imagined seeing it as Anna claimed she saw it: a horseshoe, or a log, or a rock. Impossible. She tried again, picturing the vegetables in a detached way, as if in a frame. Now this was only a photograph of a greasy plate, and after all, one wouldn’t put one’s tongue to an image or take a bite out of a page. Lib added a layer of glass, then another frame and another sheet of glass, boxing the thing away. Not for eating.